Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft uses React Native in their Start menu because the kids don't know Windows programming anymore.
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Let's use new technology just because it's new.
You see how ridiculous that sounds
Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
101–110 of 110 posts
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#102History suggests the axe may well fall on the remaining if a certain target head-count is not achieved. Seeing a lot of layoffs lately in tech generally. My sense is that Corporate knows something that the rest of us do not. (Or at least that Wall Street does not.)
I don't think most of the people they will inevitably layoff qualify for this package. age + num years work >= 70. They seem to be per-emptively shielding against age discrimination lawsuits. And yes, but no. I think we all know what's happening. No one wants to say it out loud.
Yeah, agree. It's a clever way to cull the herd of the ones you would have difficulty laying off (due, as you say, to the appearance of age discrimination).
Next up, whole teams will be axed—not individuals.
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm laughing, having explained to my wife that if you are 69 and have worked there one year you are eligible for buyout/retirement. The kid that started at 10 years old though, there for the whole 51 years: sorry, in another 9 years you will be eligible. Hilarious that there is an algorithm.
Age + years of service >= 70. 61 + 51 in your example.
I'm dumb—somehow I got it in my head it was your age when you started.
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#104> employees will be eligible if their years of work at Microsoft plus their age totals 70 or more, with some exceptions. Seems like a voluntarily retirement offer for older employees
I bet they spent a long time figuring out if it was age discrimination or not
any large firing / buyout / HR change will absolutely have HR + Legal thinking about it.
probably doesn't need a "long time" just a week to check the regs and then to get an excel sheet together of ages + salaries
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that good old high quality code Microsoft is famous for.
There is good quality stuff at Microsoft, it's just on some of the innards. NT Kernel, Direct3D, .NET Runtime. Also a lot of stuff that came out of Microsoft Research like Z3. Which also happen to be the sort of projects older devs would normally be working on.
That was exactly my point. Old C++ Microsoft was good. New Electron Microsoft is shite.
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US ageism is illegal if you are discriminating against someone for being too old. It is not illegal in the US to discriminate against someone based on how young they are
I see, thank you for the info. And is this only about the employment, or generally?
As far as I know, generally, although different categories have different laws. But it's not illegal to have housing that is reserved for elderly people. It's not illegal to require someone to be 18 or 21 to come into your place of business, etc
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#107How about stop enshittifying your products, make azure not be a pile of garbage,
All this is doing is delegating more work to AI handled by a lot of junior and unskilled “engineers” overseas or on h1’s
Azure is a disaster. Windows just keeps getting worse. Their branding department I am convinced is staffed with nutjobs. Someone has a fetish with the word “copilot”
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#108I feel like paying your most experienced employees to quit is exactly the opposite of what Microsoft needs right now. Paying to get rid of your institutional knowledge and experience is an insane move, especially as everything is on fire.
I assume this voluntary retirement offer will be something like 2 weeks of pay per year of service, plus maybe 16 weeks. And you get to keep your unvested stock. If that's not too far off, you'd expect a principal engineer's gross expected value to be something like 800k from such a move. It seems like the net opportunity cost of accepting the VR would play out like: 1) you lose 1 or 2 million net, in the scenario wh…
I've been through a few rounds of voluntary buy-outs at a big tech company. By far and away the people most likely to take the package are the people who aren't bothered by the prospect of finding another job. Some of them are delusional, but in most cases these are the younger, more dynamic employees with marketable skills who will be difficult to replace.
The people you'd want to see go, people who have been there forever and have gotten overly comfortable, people who may even hate their job, tend to stay because of 1) skill atrophy and 2) a (valid) concern about age discrimination.
Based on my own experience I don't think I'd ever do a voluntary buy-out were I running a company. The company comes out ahead when managers do their job and make the hard choices.
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
#109Can't help but notice the trend of tech companies shaving employees at an accelerating pace. Nobody wants to admit this (and there's a lot of reasons it could be temporary factors like "overhiring"), but to me this seems primarily if not exclusively driven by AI. You just can't say that to HR. The bigger question is if this keeps accelerating, can the industry and broader economy handle so many jobs disappearing, so…
Microsoft hired a lot of people post-covid. Googling, they went from 125k employees in 2017, to 163k in 2020, to 221k in 2022, and have been mostly steady in size since then (latest number from 2025 is 228k). How "temporary" is overhiring? I think that they could probably cut quite a bit from the company, and it might actually improve their output.
There are a ton of passengers at Microsoft, and many sit in the middle of our unnecessarily bureaucratic processes. They would absolutely do well to trim down.
Re: Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
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